Many wireless communication technologies have been proposed for high-speed mobile communications over the recent years. Among them, an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) technique is recognized as the most influential technology for next generation wireless communications. The OFDMA technique is currently under standardization in the working group of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 802.16e.
The OFDMA wireless communication system has downlink and uplink frames using the frequency-time resources so that a receiving end can effectively receive digital bit information transmitted from a transmitting end. In this case, the wireless communication system allocates frame resources for the receiving end and the transmitting end using a sub-channel allocation technique. There are two kinds of sub-channel allocation technique: one is a diversity sub-channel allocation technique, such as a full usage sub-carrier (FUSC) technique or a partial usage sub-carrier (PUSC) technique, and the other is an adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) sub-channel allocation technique.
As afore-mentioned, the OFDMA wireless communication system allocates frame resources for the receiving end and the transmitting end using the sub-channel allocation technique. The receiving end and the transmitting end are provided with resource information allocated from an upper node through control information contained in the frame. Accordingly, there arises a problem that the greater the degree of freedom is of the resources allocated to the receiving and transmitting ends, the more the overhead of control information contained in the frame increases.
The typical OFDMA wireless communication system under standardization in the working group of IEEE 802.16e utilizes one narrow-band frequency. However, with the recent increase of demand on multi-media services, research studies are being actively conducted on wide-band wireless communication systems which employ a plurality of frequency bands for faster data transmission. In this case, there occurs a problem that overhead is significantly increased due to the control information for the plurality of frequency bands used in the wide-band wireless communication system. In addition, there is a requirement to maintain backward compatibility with the narrow-band wireless communication system while employing the wide-band wireless communication system.